Star Citizen: October Subscriber's Town Hall

26 October 201600:53:571,602 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Welcome everybody to another edition of the subscribers town hall this month for October. Uh I am your host, community manager Jared Huckabe. And if you've never seen a subscribers town hall before, that is where we allow our development subscribers, which are those members who contribute a monthly fee to the continuing development of Star Citizen, to ask questions live of members of CIG development staff. And this month, we have members of the LA development team. So, I'd like to take a few moments to introduce them and let them tell you a little bit about what what it is they do. Immediately to my right, this is Mr. Shawn Tracy. How you doing, Sean? Good. How are you? Good. Awesome. So, why don't you tell the folks cuz we have a lot of new a lot of new backers, a lot of new subscribers even. Why don't you tell them a little bit about what you do? Give them your title and what you do for Star Citizen. Okay. Um, so I'm the technical content director uh technical director of
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content. Um, basically uh makes me responsible for everything that comes out of uh a dcc tool or a digital content creation tool um uh and goes into the engine. So basically any of the content that we're making um is my responsibility um to some degree or making it work. Uh yeah, making it work, making it perform well, making sure we can actually do it, making sure it's scalable, making Yeah, there's a lot of it. Got you. So the writers, the designers, they come up with these crazy things and then you're involved when it has to go and actually work. That's where you come make it all Yeah. Yeah. All right. So yeah, somebody else somebody else promises and he does a few things and we deliver. Yeah. I mean, it seems like a lot, but it's just space. So basically exactly anything in the universe needs to trans people come to you like Sean I got this great idea I got this thing I want
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to do yeah like a worm like a worm like a giant sand and it's your responsibility to make that work and it's like how do we make a worm work I'm like a what now immediately to your right is Mr. Forest. Stephan, how you doing, Forest? Um, excellent. Yeah, as always. Yep. You did some work on that on that sandworm, didn't you? Oh, we all we all worked on that sandworm. It was a great team effort. I mean, how do you get that thing wiggling through sand and jumping out and looking scary and looking and not looking like a Nope. A worm from Tremors. A worm from Tremors. Yeah. Sweet. All right. So, why don't you take a few moments and tell the folks watching uh what it is you do for Star Citizen in general? Uh so uh Forest I'm CG supervisor and uh my primary responsibilities is kind of working along Shawn and uh while Sean's getting
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all this stuff and making sure it's working in the engine um I spent a lot of time on the actual art side working with the graphics engineers and all the artists ensuring that when we do get the content into the game uh it visually can uh look the way that you know our art directors at Chris Roberts envision it to. So, kind of the visual fidelity of the con the tech content getting into the game is kind of what I'm more responsible for. All right. And what are some of the things you've worked on recently besides the sand? Uh, besides the sandworm. Um, so we're uh continually evolving our modular system for the characters. Um, we're continually pushing the visual fidelity on the characters, which I think we saw with the Sand Nomad. Um, we're really starting to see these nextgen uh looking characters come in. And so, a lot of the tech that really drives that. And then also kind of the workflow for the artist, trying to simplify the workflow
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so they could do things faster um and they can make it look better, right? Which is always a chess, you know, we always want to push the fidelity and we want to streamline the efficiency so we could do things quicker and create more content. That way when the players play these games in the universe, they have plenty of art content to work for. And um we can do that with our you know with the amount of artists that you know that we have. We have a habit of making things look as well as they possibly can in this game. Well, that's that's the challenge, right? We want, you know, we're creating this MMO type, you know, and we also have our single player. Uh, but at the same time, you know, we don't want those kind of stereotypical MMO graphics, right? The challenge is how to create an MMO with tons of players in the world, tons of customization, but still keep a visual fidelity of any other AAA title. Yeah. Gotcha. And last, but certainly not least, on the end, Mr.
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EKD, Eric Chiron Davis himself. Eric, how you doing, man? Uh, I'm living the dream. That's all I'm doing. How are you doing? Somebody's doing I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm doing it. I'm having a good time. So, you are a senior producer for Star Citizen out of our LA office here. Uh, what does a senior producer do? Uh, senior What does That's a great question. Can you tell me what Yes, that's Cameras aren't on. I actually just really want to know. I'm really interested. We've all been wondering for a while. So, what is it that you do? It's anything. Anything and everything uh is of the role of a producer. Um, and the senior producer in LA and I also the senior producer for Austin. So, I work with Jake Ross in Austin Studio. Um, my job is to help oversee any pipeline that's in Austin, work alongside these wonderful guys, try to keep them uh as happy as I possibly can, which is difficult at times because we're all working so hard. Uh, and then work alongside my production staff, um,
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planning, organizing, scheduling the best that we can. Um, helping provide context and priorities, working alongside the leads, um, and really all the pipelines for us here in LA. Just kind of being the point of contact. I have peers at other studios that are also senior product producers that I work alongside uh kind of working with Aaron Roberts on the global production um of this whole and so you know a lot of it's it kind of ties in together right you have the how to get the assets into the engine and then you have how do you make them look pretty but somebody's got to track these thousands hundreds of thousands of objects right and that's where production comes in right they help us in software like shotgun software right is something that we use that we kind of uh you know allows us to track our assets um and allows us to visually store the status of the asset, right? And so Eric will also help me and you know everyone else to ensure that we
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have a way to track the assets, store the assets and then organize everything that we have and then help us when we are short on resources um and to make sure that we balance it out so we can hit our deadlines, right? Yeah, resource management is pretty pretty key and and but obviously working with these guys who know how long it actually takes because that's not my forte, but I then hopefully will help them strategize and go, okay, who do you need or how much do you need to get that done or not get that done or you know, do we need to work a couple extra hours or not work a couple, right? That's that's stuff I help hopefully help with. All right, so we have three guests on the show today who all specialize in some way, shape, or form in making Star Citizen a reality. So, we are taking questions live from our RSI chat. Uh you can join the RSI chat if you're a backer and a subscriber at robertspaceindustries.com. Uh when you you go up to the top you see community
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and then you see chat. In there there is a subscribers tab. Now the subscribers tab is the only place we're taking questions uh from for today because this is a subscribers town hall. So please put your questions in there and preface the question with the word question in capital letters and brackets. It helps me uh dig them out through the other chat that's going on in the area at the moment. Uh, so right off the bat, we have some questions coming in. Uh, Sean Tracy. Jeez. Uh, first up. What a surprise. First up. First up, I have a question for Sean. That's who I always ask my question. That's who I ask. I just give it all away. Right. Yeah. The lighting in the Citizen Con demo looked absolutely amazing. Sorry. The the witch lighting the lighting. The lighting. The lighting specifically. The lighting in the Citizen Con demo look absolutely amazing. You mentioned getting the great
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uh warm sunset for free, which implies that there's now some major systemic differences in the lighting model that that there used to be versus what there is now. Uh can you touch on the difference and will we see that in 26 30? Yeah, it's a good question. So, what I what I really meant uh about getting it for free is yeah, it's in a it's in a system. It's part of the positioning of of uh where the sun is versus where your camera is on the planet um and how exactly those uh those rays are actually getting scattered through the atmosphere. So what I mean by being free is that you don't ever there's no artist going in and saying sky is blue, sky is green, sky is uh uh you know at at at 6 a.m. theuh it looks like a sunset or a sunrise or whatever uh uh whatever it's
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supposed to be. So this happens automatically. So it it it's a it's a massive switch um to how uh the engine was doing it before. What's interesting is we used to fake the exact same values within our time of day um system. So uh the the the typical Cry Engine system was a time of day system and what it is it's 02 24 hours. You had a whole timeline of of when the sun would be at a certain position above your head. Um so depending on that position you could key frame a whole ton of values. again, the sky color, uh the clouds, how bright the sun is, um all kinds really was like 120 different properties. It's pretty crazy. Anybody that spent any time in our community making these Cry Engine videos has played with time of day quite a bit. Yeah. And so what this actually does is it kind of it's not that we've
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removed time of day, it's that we've decoupled the sun from a skybox. So no longer is it 6:00 a.m. anymore. um it's only 6 am because of where that particular sun is versus where you are on that planet. Um because you know if you think about it a time zone time zones across a planet all these kind of things. Um so we decoupled the sun, made it an actual entity uh within the world uh within the actual map itself. Um so that way we can place it. And then um one of the things that a lot of people noticed and I'm super glad they did was when we did this uh two planet transition in our little tech demo um you saw that the sun was pretty high up in the sky in in on one planet but you know time didn't switch or just our positioning our relative positioning to the other planet switched. So it was
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sunset in that particular location on that one planet that we went to but it was you know middle of the day. Same star two different planets. Exactly. So it just it just becomes a positional thing on that entity rather than a key framed thing on a track if that makes any sense. Now is it just position or are there atmospheric conditions that will determine how that works? So many atmospheric conditions. Oh my goodness. Um so Carson Wel uh again one of our heroic uh uh programmers. Hi Carson. And uh uh Carson was in Krytek before he wrote a lot of the uh a lot of the atmospheric stuff within time of day uh for the Cry Engine. So to do it sort of properly, I'm sure he really liked being able to do. Um, so what we did was make it so that the atmosphere has a has a a precomputed gradients that we can put into it. So basically the artist is
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actually aligning what that atmosphere does based on the sun color that's coming into it. So we can make an atmosphere a little more green. We can make it a little more, you know, red. You can you can change the the uh the composition of the atmosphere. You can make it thicker. You can make it thinner. Um, it's really really important because you can go on different planets and some need to look like you're, you know, there's just a sky above you, but other ones are going to have a very thin atmosphere where kind of you can see all the stars, you can see most of the stuff that's just uh beyond you in space. Um, so this was a pretty big system that Carson worked on quite a bit. Um and uh the benefits I mean you're seeing it already um that we get all this sort of real-time um atmospheric scattering and shading for for free depending on what positioning you're in um from the system. I think that's the biggest I like the way you
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use the term free because it's well it's not free because you know working on it for however long. So it's not free by any freebies are so hard by you went from a system that uh you had to create uh this sky box this texture set for the morning and for the afternoon and for the evening and then you had to have uh these reflection pass textures that had to get baked for every situation. And then what were you going to do? Blend through all then what happens if you change your ecosystem to have an artist have to manually make every single sky for every single possibility just wasn't feasible not at all and so this system allowed us to have these endless possibilities so to speak without having with having very minimal artist labor and so a lot of our uh the texture memory usage that we would normally use
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comes for free now um a lot of the labor that we would normally pay for comes for free now and you get a much more realistic system and the other thing is the the performance on top of it. The performance of this particular atmospheric uh system makes it so that yeah, we can change all that in real time, have multiple planets. Um it's it's it's so much higher performant and higher quality than the than the crisis stuff that was in there before. Cry engine. And that's exactly what we're talking about like you know slamming higher higher quality, less labor. Yep. More efficient. That way we get things to the backers faster and make a better but to be there is a drawback to all of this, right? And and the drawback is that there's there's though the artist can change some of these atmospheric conditions. Uh it's not all of them. So um and this is the mark I I think of a of a really good graphics programmer is
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that they'll give you enough rope but not so much that you'll hang yourself. Yeah. Exactly. So So and the best ones um and I shouldn't call you know Carson graphic. He was far beyond just just graphics. But um it's like Yep. I mean that's that's a big part of it. Did you think when you first came on board Star Citizen, did you think we'd have this system in place now? Um, yeah, that this had to be in place. Um, there was there was always the idea that time of day was a very static uh and static in terms of yeah, you can't go out and and and and fly to the sun. Um, you know, it's just a it's just a point in the sky that's always going to be there. Um, so yeah, I absolutely expected that there would have to be some level of sunity. Cool. Uh this is a question uh for me I guess.
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Uh the Polaris is listed as having 10 size 10 torpedo launchers but the PDF manual states size six torpedoes. Could you clarify? Uh yes actually this is my camera. Uh the torpedo system changed. It was size six in the old system. This the system changed. It was size 10. That change made the website. It did not make the PDF before it went to printers. So uh those new uh those new brochures that are going out with those who have purchased the Polaris will have the correction in the brochure. It is a size 10 torpedo launcher. So that's what that is. All right. Another question for you guys. We've seen rolling hills and mountains, i.e. basic height map stuff. Do you plan for much more complex worlds, cliffs with overhangs like maybe multi Zcoordinates? Bizarre stuff like we would see in an alien sci-fi fantasy worlds full of rock towers or other
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bizarre stuff requiring a far more advanced algorithm. I think I think so. I think I think that one thing that we also really stride ourselves on is not going 110% procedural. Still having some artists ability to go in and kind of customize certain layouts in certain areas to really highlight uh the uh the location that you're traveling to. Right. So, um, I'd imagine that we're going to continually press on as far as making more and more interesting landscapes with the procedural stuff. And then we'll also have a way to artists to go in and really make something alienistic and special for certain locations. Procedural is a tool. It's not the destination. It's the thing we built the lights. I think it gets us like 90% of the way there, right? You know, it gets us very close to what we need. I think I like the term procedurally assisted. Procedurally assisted. Procedurally assisted. You
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heard it here. You heard it here, folks. Train. I love Let's see. Procedurally assisted. Um, actually a little more about the atmosphere. Let's talk a bit more about that cuz I don't think people appreciate everything that actually goes on. No, seriously, because there's a lot of work there. Um, one of the things that you have to consider with the atmosphere too is uh indirect lighting on a planet. Um, so one of the things that we used to do in the cryogen was we had an ambient level of lighting. And this is this is all the lighting that happens when a light isn't directly touching something, but it's actually shadowed. Right? So if you think about it, the atmosphere is the the sky and the atmosphere is the thing that generates most of that. So actually what they've what Carson's done is he computes an radiance um uh volume basically around the entire planet. Um so that all the locations of it get the indirect lighting um that's that's
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correct for that location. So it takes the train into account, it takes the atmosphere into account and everything. And then the direct lighting also changes a little bit depending on how it comes through the atmosphere. So again, there's a lot that goes into this atmosphere and I'm not sure to, you know, fully appreciate it, but it's almost like simulating bounce lighting a little bit, right? It's kind of simulating global illumination. That's what it is. Yeah. And why do we do all that? Why don't we just mail it in? Uh because otherwise everything would be black. Like if you put a shadow on it, black, there'd be nothing there because what you know what shades what what amount of lighting would be there. every other I shouldn't say every other game uh but a lot of the current and previous generation games had one level of ambient term u and that would mean that if it wasn't getting direct light this would be the color that it was getting shaded with um but it's like one color one setting that's it I mean you might
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animate it you might color grade it but um yeah it's not a great uh solution how awesome is that as an artist for us is that well it's essential it's essential to make things look right and to look good you know so it's uh it It's great that it got implemented because it it you know people are commenting on how great that planet site stuff looks and what Sean's saying there's a lot to it and it's the little things like that that become very big things visually you know and it saves them time um otherwise uh it sucks right now because now uh now when you're in a station like we're working in stations and things we have a system called environment probes that we use for the ambient lighting everywhere else but on a planet but when you're working on a planet it's like oh forget about the oh yeah right we've got the idians here oh no worries probes, but then when you're up working on the stations now, it's like, "Oh I got to Oh, shoot. I got to put I got to put
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uh probes back in." Sorry. You're watching the last episode of Subscribers Down Hall here on CF. If they can't handle that, they can't handle this game. Uh, Eric. Yeah. Or maybe Forest. We'll see which one of you wants to tackle this one. Sure. Where is the female avatar? That's a great Forest question. Blame Steven Bender. blame Stephen Bender. So, um there's there's a you know there's a lot that actually goes into the female avatar and it's not just making the model and getting in there, right? There's the whole animation system that also needs to work um with these characters. So, uh currently there is a significant amount of work going on with the uh the animation side to make sure that that character is going to be working properly because we do have uh the female model done. We're currently in the process of taking um a ton of
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clothing that we've made for the male character and then uh basically refitting it and uh recreating it to work with the female characters. That way um everything is going to be modular across the board. Um even though you know the female and the male have will different have different size fitting uh clothing to make sure it conforms to the body properly. But uh currently the artists are making all the female clothing. We got our female model looking absolutely fantastic. Uh we got all the female heads running in parallel with all the male heads. Um, and then the last thing that we really will need to get working is all the animation side stuff, which I'm sure for perspective. So we we we have a character, we have a female character. How many people will touch this character? How many in this company, right? And we can just talk departments touch this one extra character to add to our game. So on the
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high level, I don't need names, right? But on the high level, you have your uh animation discipline is significant to it. You have your tech animation discipline, right? To make sure that everything's working properly and technically set up which are different teams. Different teams. Animation still in their title, but they're different teams. That's right. Because the animation is responsible for the actual animation and the movement. Tech is responsible for getting it working. Yep. Um along with animation a little bit, right? Um and then you have your kind of tech artists on more of the art side to making sure that everything is working properly, efficiently, draw crawls are correct, and you could uh make sure we could populate with plenty of characters without breaking the game. Um, and then you have your character artists themselves and then you have your concept art that needs to make sure that everything looks right before we uh go spend the weeks it takes to actually create something properly. Uh, you have your uh character art director, right,
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Josh Herman. You have uh the whole head department which you know we have uh three lateral and you know Imaginarium and uh a whole uh group of people in house that uh run that whole area. Um, so you know it's it's a massive undertaking and then you have people just doing the sculpting of the character and the low poly tech design touches it doesn't it for loadout tech then once it's the character is done and it's working and then yes you have to get it over to the tech design and then you have to figure out okay um how do the attachments work? How do things get swapped out? Um what you know how do you put this on you? You know if you we have the females in the marine outfit right we got to make sure that we set up all the item attachments on all the armor pieces so it can grab everything properly. Um because the port proportions are slightly different than the male. So we got to make sure that when you reach for that gun, right?
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You're it's gonna be it's gonna work, right? As opposed to, you know, all that stuff. So Oh, and then QA and then it's done with all the tech people then you get it to QA, you know, and then get all that working and then you throw it in the game and then absolutely nothing works. Y and then you and you might have code bugs, you might have things you got to fix because then you got bugs. So, the reason I I asked is I was on a a panel. We were talking about um we were talking about second like second character in a video game, any video game ever, right? And the question was, why is why is there only one in there? I don't get it. I don't understand why there's only one in there. And somebody made just a random comment was like, oh, it's just it's hard. No, no, it's not just hard, right? And obviously what we're doing is hard. We got a lot of people, so there's a lot of things you could say against that. We're working. We've got a lot of great people on it, but it it is a very intricate process to do it right to get a second character in
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there to then and what we're doing is we're not just getting a second character in there. These guys are building entire pipelines to make this whole thing efficient and faster for future ones. We're doing all the characters at the same time. It's not we're making one and then when we're done, we'll think about doing another one. And one thing we've learned from this, one thing we've learned from, you know, our experience of developing this game um from from scratch is it's really important to get your infrastructure in place and to prove out all of your techniques and your workflows and your methods because if you try to do two things in uh parallel before you've proven one method, you could be doing them both wrong. And we want to be as efficient as possible. So we want to make sure we get it right and then we move on to the next challenge. A lot of great lessons. So that yeah then that's pretty much the reason the female isn't isn't there right now. So just to give you a real like you know some details on that. Anyways um the male okay so the
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female and male skeletons are two different skeletons. So conceptually completely different characters uh could be a van duel could be so the implementation of that second skeleton just like you're saying is is you know though it's you know yeah it's a female it's just a tiny bit smaller than the male. Yeah sure but it is another asset. episodes. Um, but one of the tricks is, okay, now we're going to make this female. We've got motion captured animations, too, but we've also got a lot of authored animations for the male. And I mean, the first game, if you're ever going to implement a female and they can't do everything that the male can do in terms of animation, in terms of uh using weapons, in terms of equipping outfits, oh my goodness, the the the blowback would be awful. Um, so you have to make sure you are at par with with that male. Um, so because they're two different skeletons, we've
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got all of a sudden we have to do a different animation sets. So the male in Star Citizen currently has about 6,000 animations or so. Now, they're not all in the PU. They're not all seen necessarily by the players at this exact moment. Uh, but they will be. And what that means is, yeah, that's 6,000 other animations now on the female and that has to be in parody. And what Forest was saying was you can't you can't figure out the problems on two different s on two similar systems at the same time. rather get one locked down. So what he means is that we're we're really not even finished the male, right? We're not finished the male human completely where it's he does cover correctly, he does prone correctly, he does mantling correctly. And it's not even just doing it. It's that he does it and it looks really good and we are all happy with it. Once you're there, boom, through the
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female because then it's uh it's just a matter of transferring animation. we call it um right now we've got a a whole bunch of females within the squadron 42 and a lot of them are uh transferred over from the male and then feminized a bit or they they are brought in from uh from motion capture data but uh again trying to do two at the same time without having locked down and perfected that first one is a real trick. So, and we could always just bail and do the easy thing, which is, and we've we talked about it. We could do the very easy thing of just say, "All right, females, males, exact same size." So, all of a sudden, you share the rig, and you know what? You could have female avatars tomorrow if we made that concession. Um, but females have a different proportion. This is this is just a reality. Um, and I feel like um and and you know, the the everyone in
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charge and the way it went uh feels that that's important enough. um to to um take our time take our time with it. Yeah. Have the mail locked down then transfer it on. And for those wanting to see more about, you know, perfecting the animations, check out this week's Bug Smashers. Oh, cool. Just about the vaulting animations. Oh, about the vaults. Perfect. See, and you can see that it's Yeah, the system's there, but it needs to be finalized because there is things that will change to just get a little bit of polish out of it. Um but then to have to reapply that to a female or another character, whatever. But the cool part is once females online that means uh van duel jean all these other uh races that we want to do are quite easy to bring online within those systems as well. What's the quote? The first 90% of video game development is harder than the last%. I think it was
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Tim Sweeney Tim Sweeney the best. If the second 90% of game development is takes longer than the first 90% somewhere Yeah. Yeah. So it's all about getting those systems in place then it's to the races. That's right. All right. So, here's a question. Um, we didn't completely answer one of the questions before, by the way. Uh, well, no, it was on the terrain. They asked about more complex terrain features like caves and over the next question. That's the question I was just about to ask. Yeah, but they already kind of asked that. We'll ask it now. Jared, ask your question. Well, okay. Go ahead. Oh, no. Here it is. I'm going to ask this question. Anybody other than Sean Tracy can answer. Ooh, following up on the procedural question. Will there be underground caves to explore and overhangs and things that we didn't
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answer before, right? Um, so will there be uh I can't tell you for sure how how we would do it. We could do it. Um, but everybody's got to realize too like as soon as you get into the 3D, right? As soon as it's not a 2D representation anymore, things get a lot harder because you that that is why the Cry Engine had a voxil system before. We had a voxil system in the Cry Engine where you would define an area, it would copy the terrain into a voxil and then all of a sudden you'd start sculpting caves and it was a really cool um um sort of process. The planets are not voxil. Um these are these are planets of using height maps. Yeah. Meshes. Um so to be able to represent anything in 3D on a 2D height map is not really possible. Um that's not something that we can do super easy. So things like overhangs, um, caves, anything that that goes
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beyond that 2D, um, uh, isn't really built into that system. Now, will there be because to make these things, you know, you do it the typical way that games have done it in the past where you actually make the models of this stuff. Yeah. And it's not a it's not an odd thing, and it's not a I don't think it's a copout either by any stretch of the imagination where you model those objects because there we put tech in place so that those models now look far more part of the terrain. And I, you know, it's pretty hard to tell already. Um, just b like in the Homestead demo, it's hard to tell which ones of those are are actual assets that have been placed with the distribution system or if those are actual uh terrain features, right? It's it's tricky to tell, but real easy way is if it's going to be a cave or if it's going to be an overhang, probably model, you know. Um, so it's not that they won't be in the game, it's
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that created, right? They're not going to be created from this current planet system because it's more a question of what system drives it. Right. And Right. And how important is it after all? Right. Yeah. Exactly. Like I think you start with the art, right? And you get the art in there and then if it be it becomes, you know, the the importance level, you know, gets higher and higher and higher and then you start figuring out better tech solutions because you find out that it's a good use of time, right, to go that route. But again, prototype it, get it in there, you know, and let's see how it works, you know? But yeah, art you can you can do pretty much caves, you can do whatever you need. So cool stuff. Eric, yep. What's your philosophy for keeping devs on task that might have many dependencies in an agile environment? Would you describe CG's process as pure agile or some sort of hybrid?
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Is this person a producer or wants to be a producer? That's a question I would have asked before I was in this industry. Um, well, first of all, there's a difference between philosophy and what's actually happening in practice, right? Mhm. You can have philosophies all day. Production tends to have very is very good at pontification, right? We can talk because that's part of our job. Um, but generally I judge someone based on their philosophy because that's what they'll do in emergency or chaos situations sometimes. Uh, so what is CIG's production process? It depends on the pipeline. Honestly, we can't have one specific way to do everything because it's not how that's not how what we do works or really anything works when it comes to creative projects. I've never worked on a project at any company where I had one way that worked for everybody all the time. It just it's not that's not how this works. Um it depends on I
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think that waving the gun around gets the point across. Yeah. The the live gun fire in the studio is very powerful. Uh so are massages. So are massages. So yeah. Yeah. So um so some teams are are are really hardcore agile, right? It really works well for them because two two week sprints is a great Right. Software development two week sprints are fantastic. um art assets. That's not necessarily the best way to do agile doesn't work. I think the perfect example would be um take like um the uh either the ship pipeline or or more or even better example the character tasking pipeline and then take a graphic engineer's uh task. So a graphics engineer is much more agile. It's you literally have a list of things that need to get completed and then you queue them up in order which is an absolute agile production method. And then you have uh the other route which is more
00:30:45
art task which is more pipeline and disciplines right so you have your upstream dependency and your downstream dependency and you start with your concept y and then you have your uh you know you know you have your design guide and then you have your concept and then you have the high-res sculpt and then you have the game topology and then you have your texturing y and then you have your then it goes off to you know your animation and then it starts branching and you start having this tree of like parallel dependencies and it gets a little more complicated but um Yeah. So, I think you're right. It really depends on the the discipline that you're talking about and and and in in all of our pipelines, the discovery process is very important. Um what we're doing across the board in certain areas is is unique. Some of it's not, but most of it's very unique. Uh discovering things is very hard to schedule and plan and organize. You you do plan for it. It's called uh it's called adding time
00:31:34
because you know it's going to happen and come. Um, but when you're doing something unique, it's you can't be we're not making houses, we're not creating, we're not manufacturing trailers, right? We're making something creative. So, we have a lot of creative people. Uh, creative people um have great ideas and sometimes our other ideas are better than their current ideas. So, understanding which one's the best idea to use at the time, um, which one you take and put in the backlog, which one you uh activate on to get out the first version, right? There's all kinds of factors that go into planning, organizing, schedule. He's so political. It's It's the way you said that. You're saying that some people have bad ideas, but you didn't say bad or or Oh, man. For me, I look at this camera. This camera's on me. Look at this guy. Let's go look at this camera. He's really good at wording. For me, uh I think
00:32:22
understanding working alongside your leads, working alongside your directors is absolutely key. um production our our job is to somewhat stay partially outside of the actual details because then we can look at it objectively if we get too far in but at the same time we need to have some basic level of knowledge right I always think a good producer did the work before generally right either in their their degree or their background pure business guys or girls are cool uh and they have something to offer as well but I found that they have more challenges if unless they've actually done it themselves even if it's at like a school project or or outside you do a mod outside of work right it just it helps to have that level of knowledge. Uh you can't know everything all the time. So you have to rely on your team. Um and there has to be a level of trust, right, between between your folks. So back to your question, what is my philosophy? My production philosophy. I don't remember.
00:33:09
Well, I'm I'm I'm what's CIG's? Yeah. Well, the original is what's your philosophy and then what's CIG's production practices? I'm hoping these guys probably at this point could answer what my philosophy is, but uh um the perfect project management triangle, of course, and I talk about this quite a lot. the health of your your staff, the the the culture that you're cultivating, the uh support. I'm gonna bang on the table because I know you guys like that. Uh the support system that we try to provide. Uh work life balance is very important. Um but my philosophy is is work alongside the team to get it done as fast as we can without killing anybody. It's keeping your head afloat, right? I mean, we're always trying to keep track of everything that needs to get done. And a lot of things that we do are we've never done before. So a lot of times it's kind of hard to uh you know give estimates or track stuff until
00:33:57
we've done it once and then we're like okay we kind of know what this is how long this takes and then we can kind of you know start doing a production road map right on on to say this is when this could get done and the more times we do it the more metrics we have and the more averages we have you know totally we've done this 10 times now we've known it's taken this much time each time just totally average that number out and we got a pretty good idea. So totally and tracking that data is what's really important about it. It is very important. It's very difficult without the right team, but it is very important especially because we move fast. Yeah, we do. And and you know, every time you add a new element to that process, it changes generally the bid, right? So, Forest and I were early working together on characters when the pipeline was in infantile stages. Some Force done some great work. The team's now doing awesome stuff. But that initial number we got from how long does a character take, we were so proud of that number in our pipeline, in our process with our team.
00:34:45
What does it take to build a character from start to finish with one artist, right? you generally do man months or by individuals. But now as the team's grown, as the pipeline's adjusted slightly, as things have gotten more efficient, some things have gotten a little harder, we've gotten more people in play, that changes your bids. So, you start with that number, but that's probably not going to get you to the end. It might be faster, it may be slower, but it's uh it's it's it's fun. And once you have all that all that all your tasks and your bids laid out, and then you can start doing stuff like, okay, uh to get all this stuff done, uh it's going to take until like 2022. Then you're like, okay, but we only have one resource. So what if we had four resources and then you see how it goes and it allows you on the production side to balance all of these uh you know to get your numbers into you know when you need to release by and obviously there's other factors like you bring on new people there's the ramp up time you know
00:35:32
and stuff like that. So um you know it's you know it's the challenge is growing a company and still developing you know at the same time and try to keep track of everything. So it's it's a tough job but um you know somebody's got to do it. Somebody's got to do it. Yeah. Okay. Follow-up question for Mr. Tracy. If female characters are smaller, would it not make it so that the smaller profile gives an advantage in a firefight? It could. Um, the thing is is we've uh the way physics works on a character is it exists on the skeleton. So, yes, you have a you have a conceptually smaller skeleton on the female. Now, it's not dramatic enough that I would actually even make a change between the male and female. And it goes back to what I was talking about before, um, is is an equality thing. It's,
00:36:21
uh, it's not good to give a gameplay advantage just based on the sex of your character. I don't think that's that's fair. Um, and it's probably as it's probably primed to be argued um, whether or not that's the case. Um, I tend to hate it in uh there was some MMOs that I'd played in the past where it was actually the best thing to do to scale down your characters or the absolute smallest you possibly could so that on a mass, you know, gaggle battle, um, you would be the hardest to click. Do you know what I mean? So, and like I get it. Um, but I don't want to encourage it. So, so basically what I'm saying is that I'd prefer um and it's likely well it is the case right now um in in the Squadron 42 female character implementation that the the actual uh the physics representation of that skeleton is
00:37:10
identical to the male. So it's exactly So can I just say this is one of the reasons I absolutely love this community because immediately we started talking about minmaxing in FPS y with the character fantastic. So is that is that why every time we try to play a game you try to pick a skinny dwarf? Yeah, it's just me projecting. I've just not even had a thing for skinny dwarfs. There's a difference between projecting and minmaxing. Sean, you try to do both is what it is. Interesting. So, uh yeah, hopefully that answers the question. Um look how much we learn about Shaw. I know. This is great. What is a little weird about that is that, you know, the hitbox does extend a bit past what you can actually see on that character. So, I mean, we're talking a couple inches, but it might be enough that actually we want to change some things, but we would probably make it so that we have a perfect average between the two. So, you make the male one a tiny bit smaller and
00:37:57
then make the female one a tiny bit bigger so that they actually line up correctly and perfectly to each other. It's a thing that we can address in bance. Definitely. All right. Um, all right. This is a question. I know who this is a question for, but uh for most games now, your CP CPU speed is more important than the number of cores your processor has. I just built an i7 5930K with six cores and hyperthreading. Do you think Star Citizen will use all of these cores better in the future, or will raw CPU speed still be most important? Forest. Oh, that I thought that was for you, dude. Yeah, that's for Jared. Yeah, go for it. Actually, I'll let Sean answer that one because it's a better idea. Better in terms of uh scaling it will be to have as many courts as you can. Um the the future of
00:38:47
most Well, I shouldn't say that at all. Um the you know, I don't I just don't want to make an assumption like that. Um the paralization is the big Yeah. Uh uh is the big improvement as as we move forward and you'll see better and better utilization of the cores um the longer we we work on it. So, I would say you'd want to get more cores. I would, but but again, if it's there's a, you know, there's a happy medium in there where it's like, yeah, don't get anything that's, you know, crazily slow, but just completely paralyzed because it might be a lot slower. Um, but yeah, we do a fairly good job of the multi-threading right now. 18 cores running at 700 MHz. Sure. That'd be awful. I mean, I just I just No, it's like a brain though, actually. Um, because they're My brain's brain. No, no, no. It's just a human
00:39:35
brain. Yeah, I mean I just built a computer and I definitely got the six cores in there, you know, like utilizing a full full speed ahead. Six cores with hyperthreading, you're fine. I mean, yeah, that's push it. You're good. Push it. Just do it. Right. Reminder to folks that we are taking questions from the RSI subscriber chat on robertspaceindustries.com. You can submit your questions there. Uh we also collected some questions from our subscribers den in the forum. That's where some of these questions have been coming from today. Another question from that thread. Uh, can you guys tell us something about an upcoming feature that you're looking forward to? What's something on the horizon you're looking forward to that you know, not spoiler, something? See, all mine would be super spoilers. I mean, uh, I'm a I'm a big FPS fan. I always have been, right? Going back to
00:40:23
well before, but Golden Eye, right? And then and Counter Strike and, you know, all those good ones. So, I've always had a little in my heart. Why you laugh at Golden Eye? Golden Eye is like Golden Eye is awesome. No, I I played Golden Nighting. Uh FPS are a little Thank you. little closer to my heart. Um I'm also a huge MMO fan and I love multi, you know, big whatever, but uh I I can sit down and grind grind through some death matches and some stuff. So, I'm personally looking forward to Star Marine. Uh I'm I'm really enjoying playing it. I think it's it's got a lot of uh a lot to offer and I think this, you know, it's only going to get better from the first time we introduce it. Again, we've got it in the game already, right? So, you can get some basic basic functionality of running around and shooting people, which I'm already loving when I'm in in our our our map now. Uh, but I think it'll be cool to have that mode. That's something I'm personally very excited about. I'm a huge deathmatch fan, so I I enjoy
00:41:11
ranking up the kills. To go with that, I think something that um in the in the future that I'm kind of looking forward to is um is I want to be boarded. I want some ship. I know. I want that FPS. I want you to be able to get into my ship and start firing, you know, and defend that ship. Totally. I mean, I think that that would be sweet. That would be I'm sorry. Totally. No, I I don't I don't I just the whole multi crew aspect of our game, but yeah, we're gonna talk about that. That's stuff I'm excited about. I could live on my ship. What's your favorite? Uh it's it's not very uh sexy by any stretch of the imagin. Object container streaming. Oh, that's a big one. Seriously, that's like that's one of the biggest like that that is as big as the 2.0 window roll out, you know, the mini PU stuff once that's online. Uh, the universe is
00:42:00
our oyster basically. Um, because that's Yeah, I think pretty much one. Can you just give them a brief intro? Wow. I mean, it there's kind of a lot to talk about with object container streaming, but just the basic idea of an object container. And it sounds so simple. It's like, oh, why didn't that exist already? Um, container with objects in it, right? Sure. Exactly. So, you can't access it and then push it through an official. But you could say that a prefab or an archetype was kind of the same sort of thing before or just a group of entities. Why don't you just group them together and call that an object container? Well, it's kind of not that simple because there's uh uh the Cry Engine had a bunch of different u uh partitioning systems um um spatial partitioning system. So then there physics system had one uh uh uh render has one that there's a bunch of different ones. So the zone system and
00:42:49
you know this is getting to be very unsexy explanation but the zone system was was the unification but at the same time at the same time it is some of the most sexiest stuff right like the stuff you don't see yeah no and it's the stuff that you don't see but um it it takes so much work um zone partitioning system is not hard it's hard to make them fast um and it's hard to get them to talk to each other if they're different um so what we had done was first get the zone system online and you've probably heard a lot about that but what that is is a more advanced partitioning system that actually unifies them all across all the modules so uses the same as use the render us the same with this. So then you've got to embed those those partition systems into a container of sorts that that composes a bunch of assets. Now you might have multiple zones within that one object container,
00:43:36
but you've got to load them all at the same time basically. Um so an object container is exactly like what Forest is saying. It's just it's it's a container for objects. Um but what we have to be able to do is to be able to stream them in and out without keeping them in in memory. Basically on level load we can't have them all there. That's the thing. So uh we need to be able to stream them in and out dynamically. We do it with we can do it with prefabs. We can do it with entity archetypes but nothing to the scale of the uh object containers. We can do it with small scale ones right now but it you know it's is a little bit slow when it gets uh pretty hefty. So that's what you know Stephen Humphrey's been working his his rear off working on it. Um, so that that streaming is actually very quick and it gets all those the type of objects that go into the container. A great example is like the space station. Yeah. Right. That's
00:44:24
you know we want that thing is those things could be massive and we need to efficiently stream those in. Right. Sure. And it's not just the station asset. It's like the station asset, the shop in it, the character in it, the gun that he's holding, the attachments on the weapon that he's holding. So there's a huge hierarchical um load that has to happen and a lot of this and just crying conceptually uh you would do all this on level load. You would you would do it's almost like in the past you work with level streaming and we're almost like we needed to go so far past that because we're endless we needed to stream objects in and it's almost like they are levels. So it's almost like that's exactly what an object incredibly impressive level level streaming system with level inside of a level you know like right that's exactly how I explain it now too is that um if anybody had worked on uh on a cryine project or or
00:45:13
worked in the cry engine before or even on any other level editor uh the object container is the equivalent of just uh that level but it exists in the paradigm of a larger level. So yeah it's and I'm sure we're to I'm sure we're mucking it up. I'm sure the people that write this stuff are like, "Yeah, Humphre is going. He's watching right now." Close. We love you, Steve. We're super excited for what you're working on. No, it's pretty close. But again, the object container thing, it's essential for capital ships. It's essential for uh universe streaming. So, being able to go from planet one to planet two with whole cities on them and all this kind of stuff. And that's how it's all going to work. So, uh well, I just won't ask my question about object containers right now. Is there really an object container question next? The next question. Oh, that's hilarious. That's why I gave
00:46:00
force the excellent my no uh basically you covered everything else. U the only part that's left of their question is about the size. What what what size limitation? And you know what? That's something we're figuring it out right now. And um that's is this a perfect segue into the No, I was already for it. So we're we're saying I'm most excited about the streaming coming online. And by the way, it works pretty much. Um so it's not like this is a a tough nut that we haven't been able to crack yet. It's we've cracked it. Oh, it's cracked. It's just yeah, we we've got to figure out what we can get out of it. Um so, uh we don't yet know uh exactly the size that we want to make them. Um we've tried various sizes. I mean, I've put a singular character into one. Uh and we have capital ships in one. So, you know, we need to set those budgets. Um the other difficult thing about it, and if anybody's worked on a on a game project,
00:46:48
they'll they'll understand this, but um managing uh level budgets. So, not per view budget, but everything in the level. You've got to make sure that designer one knows, oh yeah, you just added 10 megs. Designer two knows, oh yeah, you just took away four megs. You know, we need a way of of of budgeting those designers on being able to do certain things or or not do other things. Um, and we can't yet tell them um until the streaming is working exactly as we need it, what the optimum size of that container needs to be. um what kind of assets can go in there, what kind of ones don't, should they be separated? Yeah. Uh all those kind of rules and that's really actively what we're doing over the last few weeks anyways. And in the end, it really comes down to a numbers game. Totally, right? Profiling at the very end comes down to
00:47:35
a numbers game. This is the numbers you have to work with and you have to stay within your budget. Sure. Sure. Gotcha. All right, we are just about done. Uh one of the final questions here. Let's get warmed up. We have a quick we have a quick question in relation to the atmosphere. Currently we enter it at about 10,000 ft. Is there any plan to extend the atmosphere to higher altitudes? Mhm. Uh yeah, and it's all extendable. It's all uh user defined so the artist defines it. Um I haven't measured some of the ones that we have in there right now. Uh but absolutely I would think that would be a big part of it. I think one of the big reasons they made them pretty shallow uh was just the amount of time that it took to get down. Yeah. So, um I think if they did it realistically, there's a I mean it would just take a long time. Um
00:48:24
but yeah, I mean short answer is that it's actually just a setting. And what's cool, I think that um I I completely didn't even think of until I realized it didn't is they do put some code in there that um makes sure that the engine knows when you're within the atmosphere and when you're outside of the atmosphere. And that allows us to a lot of cool things. you know, probably down the road with some gameplay support. Like, I mean, if you're flying in, you know, what is the flight system when you're outside in space and then if you notice we have a different flight system when you're actually on the planet stuff and that's how you know is that atmosphere and that the code that they put in there to tell us when you're in and when you're out and then we could probably start transitioning effects in what do effects look like? Contrails on ships, all this stuff that would happen inside of an atmosphere that, you know, may not be as realistic maybe in space, right? So, um, that's something I'm really Does a boat go slower in atmosphere? Totally
00:49:13
probably would. And I mean we teased some of that in Homestead, but that was the idea, right? When when we have that reaction, planetary reaction to the ship and and John Pritchette, I know one of our physics engineers, very very smart, talented guy. Uh he that's what he's been working on a lot, right? Not just how the dragonfly works on a planet, but now also ships flying there. What ships fly in atmosphere better than fly in space? And these are all these are all great things that we're starting to develop and I think gives a lot of opportunities, really exciting opportunities. It's really cool. One other thing along the lines of what Forest was saying was uh so it knows whether you're in the atmosphere or not. What it also knows about is the gravity uh around the planet. So that's super cool. Um the fact that there's even a there's a small fall-off uh that happens in there as well. So we have a variable amount of gravity on every single one of these planets. What you know what we
00:50:01
don't necessarily show in Homestead is the funny thing that happens to all of us really. So we're we're flying around in the atmosphere whatever. Um you're in a Connie and then you get out of your seat, right? but your ship turns off. So, this is one of the item 2.0 things. Anyways, we're going to leave the ships on or give you the ability or something like this. Uh, but yeah, as soon as your ship turns off, guess what? Gravity's on. Yeah. So, so you're walking in you're walking to the back of your ship and you don't realize you're actually hurtling towards the freaking ground. Uh, whatever rate. Um, and and then you get halfway out and the ship explodes and you're like, "Oh, right." And that's going to be helpful when you're in space, too, cuz say you want to get out, leave your headlights on that's facing an asteroid and like fly over to it. you know, kind of use your vehicle as an as an extra an extra light source, excuse me. Um, so that's uh super cool. But it is fun to work in these planetary tools
00:50:48
because the whole engine is was the tool set was kind of built um for this kind of flat playing field. Right now all of a sudden we're working on this planet where you're actually like like this in space compared to where that normal plane would be. And so, um, the next challenge really is kind of working on the tool set to make the the workflows and all the things we have to reimplement because of because of that change. I'm going to make your show super um like a nice example is what we ran into with the cloth for the nomad. I think this is a perfect way to explain like what happens. So again, consider the Cry Engine really had this idea of Z up like that that was it, you know, Z is upwards. uh we had this cloth implementation that we put on the Nomad. Cool. When he's standing on a perfectly solid plane that has Z up, yeah, cloth
00:51:37
is falling downwards, right? However, if you happen to be on the bottom of a planet, um no longer set up, but you're like this, right? The whole cloth simulation system was assuming Z up. So, it thought the gravity was going this way. So, as you stood up, your cloth was coming straight up from your head like this, right? So, you know, it just it looked absolutely ridiculous and it was totally different depending on where you were on this planet because all of a sudden you're upside down and the engine just had no idea about that. Pretty much Marty Gro. Uh yeah, exactly. Uh so, and that happened for a lot of different systems. So, luckily Evo already put a fix in for that. So, that was not not a not a dramatic, you know, change that had to happen. But it's so many things like this. You don't even think it's the discovery process, right? And I think that's what we were talking about earlier, not just in the production
00:52:23
planning phases, but just going through this. Yeah. some exciting discoveries, some frustrating discoveries, but all of them making it a better product at the end than what we already have out there. Yeah. And because we're really concentrating on making it scalable because we want this game to be around for a very long time, you know. So, in the past, you know, Crisis, you just drop that wind entity in and it went on that you're good, right? But now we're like, wait a minute, we don't want to just have uh designers place wind entities over an entire planet. That way, it kind of moves. you know, now you need a system that's more proced that can actually make sure that the wind is curving around the planet properly and working. It's just all these little things, but that's the fun of it and that's the challenge. But once the foundation's built, um, and then we're really sprinting these planetary sized little things. That's what I love about things. Yeah. And with that, that brings
00:53:11
our October subscriber edition town hall to a close. Uh, thank you so much to Eric Hyron Davis, uh, or Stephan and Sean Tracy. If you're interested in learning even more about our procedural generation system, tune in to Around the Verse tomorrow, uh emanates from our Frankfurt office and you'll see some even even more information about the the procedural system. Thank you Jared. And thank you Jared as always. I just sit here and read the questions. So again, Eric Forest, Sean, I'm Jared. Thanks for watching, guys. Bye.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.